A. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to the state management of network elements, and more particularly, to the display of various attributes relative to various objects in computer software programs running on various network elements.
B. Background of the Invention
In a telecommunication or data communication network system, network elements (“NE”) are connected to allow for the communication of information or messages within a network. Each NE typically has various objects that may have different states. Many of the systems and network elements therein, are supplied by multiple vendors that may have different management structures and user interfaces. These differences across the vendors oftentimes result in inconsistency and problem in accessing management information.
In the development of these management structures and user interfaces, vendors usually consider multiple standards in building their products. However, there may be variances across these standards relating to certain states of a NE resulting in a state having multiple different standards. These different states are caused by the fact that a graphical application or text-based application, such as TL-1, generally follows its own set of standard and own set of states.
Because each standard defines and recommends its own set of state attributes, it is required to provide state modeling of an object. The objective of state modeling is to provide users with complete information about the state of a system and the contained managed objects. For example, a user may require information relating to management of an object, or information relating to the inherent capability of providing service completely or partially relative to the object.
The simplest approach would be to model every attribute as required by every standard and let the user interface choose the appropriate attributes for display. FIG. 1 shows two different standards, Standard 1 101 and Standard 2 102, each having different attributes. Standard 1 101 has A1 101.1, A2 101.2, and A3 101.3 attributes while Standard 2 102 has A11 102.1, A12 102.2, and A13 102.3 attributes. These attributes are individually modeled and provided to the user interface.
Standard 1 101 has model 103 M1, M2, M3, for attributes A1 101.1, A2 101.2, and A3 101.3 respectively. Similarly, Standard 2 has model 104 M11, M12, M13, for attributes A11 102.1, A12 102.2, and A13 102.3 respectively. The required models 103, 104 are then selected by a user through an interface 105 and displayed 106. Though this approach is simple, each interface will need to maintain every kind of combination of standards and attributes resulting in a large number of attributes to any internal NE to support. This large number of attributes may require significant maintenance in a real-time environment that is fairly expensive in terms of information processing required in the software program.
The management structure and user interface may have inconsistencies between different state attributes. For example, if a state supports 5-6 different standards, then the corresponding management software may results in 20 to 30 attributes of each object in order to satisfy the various standards. As explained earlier, this approach is not practical in a real-time system since even a small change of state may require an update of the attributes. This updating process may need to be performed often requiring significant effort by a network administrator.
Accordingly, what is needed is a system, apparatus and method that addresses the above-described shortcomings.